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In March of 2025, the Trump Administration was widely criticized for sending more than two hundred Venezuelans to CECOT, a notoriously brutal mega-prison in El Salvador. Yet, over the past eleven months, the Administration has continued the practice of deporting large numbers of noncitizens to so-called third countries, or countries to which the deportee typically has no connection. This is often because many immigrants living in America have judicial orders that prevent the government from sending them to their home country owing to the risk of persecution. This third-country practice has continued, however, despite the fact that a number of deportees have been sent back to their home countries after arriving in the third country. (Others remain stuck in prisons.) Recently, the Administration sent nine people of various nationalities to Cameroon, where most of them are now being held in detention until they agree to return to their home countries.

I recently spoke by phone with Ahilan Arulanantham, a law professor at U.C.L.A. and the faculty co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy there. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how judges have tried to limit the Trump Administration’s use of this third-country loophole by demanding that it bring wrongly deported immigrants home, the legal process that allows this type of deportation, and how the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to rein in the Trump Administration has strained federal courts.

Early in Trump’s second term, there was a lot of concern about the degree to which immigration authorities would start removing people from America and sending them to third countries. A year later, how prevalent is this?

I think it’s important to distinguish between third-country arrangements that result in the deportees being imprisoned in a foreign country, and other kinds of third-country arrangements, where, for example, Mexico has agreed to take in people who are not from Mexico and then, in some way or another, encourage those people to go back to their home countries. I would say that, in the case of the latter, the deportations to countries where people are just left at sea have happened on a massive, really unprecedented scale.

The former, which are these deportation-to-prison arrangements, obviously happened with El Salvador, and then in other places like Ghana, and they’re also very troubling. But the total number of them is small. It’s probably less than a hundred, if you leave out the ones to El Salvador.

In January, the Trump Administration secretly deported nine people to Cameroon, where none of them are from, according to the Times. It seems like when the Administration is legally prohibited from deporting people to a country where they may be persecuted, they send people to a third country, and then essentially throw up their hands and say, “Well, if the third country is going to send them to the country that they’re not supposed to be sent to, we can’t do anything.” Some legal observers argue that this workaround is just as illegal. How do you see it?

I think it’s clearly illegal for two different reasons. The Administration’s recent arrangement with Cameroon resulted in the imprisonment of these nine people in Cameroon, and, at least in the reporting that I’ve read, most of them will be imprisoned unless they agree to go back to their home country. So that’s punishment. When you send somebody to a place to be imprisoned, that is imprisonment without trial. And so that, I think, is unquestionably illegal.

Separate from that, even in cases where they’re being sent to these places, and it’s not necessarily resulting in imprisonment, but it’s resulting in a follow-on deportation, that is illegal—absent the person having had an opportunity to challenge that arrangement in the United States in immigration court. The law requires deportees to receive notice of the country to which they are going to be removed, and then an opportunity to raise any claims against that decision in court. This was challenged in Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D. last year, a class-action lawsuit challenging the government’s practice of sending people to third countries without providing any notice or opportunity to challenge the legality of that arrangement. A lower court held a hearing, took evidence, and issued a ruling declaring that procedure unlawful and requiring the government to provide notice in such situations. But the Supreme Court then stayed that order in mid-April without real explanation. They didn’t say that the lower court was wrong. They just said that the government can keep doing third-country deportations while the case is pending.

Is the Court going to come back and provide an explanation for why it stayed the order at some point?

The way the Supreme Court handles stay orders requires that the case come back to the Supreme Court, and then the Court has to either agree to take it or not. And if they decide not to take it, then the stay expires at that point. So you’re right that every time the Supreme Court stays an order in these cases, it means that the case will return to the Supreme Court, but it’s not like that happens immediately. That can take months and months, and there is, in my view, a direct line from the Supreme Court’s stay order in the D.V.D. case to the months of third-country removals that we’ve been seeing without people having any opportunity to contest the legality of that practice.

So is the lack of any opportunity for the deportees to have the Supreme Court rule on the challenge to third-country removal before they were flown away the reason that you think this was illegal?

The law on this is that a noncitizen gets to elect the country to which they will be deported in the event of an order of removal after a deportation hearing. The immigration judge asks the person to elect which country they wish to be removed to. In that case, the government has to try to send the person to their requested country. But if they can’t, for whatever reason—and one reason might be because the immigration judge has said, “You’ll be tortured there,” and barred it—then the government has to go through a whole list of other possible places to which they can send the person, like places where the person transited through or any other place where the person held any residency status. If none of those places agree to take them, they can be deported to any other country that accepts the person. But in that case they have to tell the person, We’re going to send you to this country. And because that wasn’t the subject of the original removal proceeding, they have to be given the opportunity to challenge the removal to that country.

Take an example of Venezuelans being deported to Mexico. The deportees might say, I don’t believe that the Mexican government has a problem with me. The Mexican government isn’t in league with the Maduro regime. But here’s the evidence that when you send me to Mexico what’s going to happen is the Mexican government is going to then deport me to Venezuela, and so I will face harm from being sent to Mexico because it will inevitably result in my return to Venezuela where I am going to be persecuted or tortured as you’ve already found, Your Honor. So that argument should be available to the people being sent to Cameroon.

“I don’t want to go to my home country of Zimbabwe, and Cameroon’s going to send me to Zimbabwe,” basically.

Exactly, exactly. Because I have a reasonable fear that they will send me to Zimbabwe, I also have a persecution claim against Cameroon directly.

So, just to be clear, if there is no overlap between the countries that the person wants to go to and the places that will take them, then what?

Then the government has the right to try to send you to any other country that will accept you as long as that country consents.

And then you get a chance to challenge that. And then if you lose the challenge, you go.

Correct. So you could imagine a situation where there was a hearing about this, and the government said, “No, actually, you’re wrong. In fact, you will not be forcibly sent to Zimbabwe,” or “That’s not the nature of the arrangement with Cameroon” and “Here’s the evidence from the Cameroonian government that says they’ll allow people like in your situation to stay and live and work in their country, and there isn’t a reasonable probability that you’ll be sent anywhere else.” And if they win that argument, then it’s fine.

My understanding is that the Administration’s reply to court orders concerning people who have already been deported to a third country is “What do you want us to do? They’re in a third country now.”

Yes, I think that is what the government has said in a few of these cases. They said this in the El Salvador situation, saying, “What could we do in El Salvador? It’s not up to us.” If they had allowed a hearing in advance, as they are legally obligated to do, and as the district court in the D.V.D. decision found that they had to do, then this would not have been an issue. Because the probability that Cameroon is going to send you to Zimbabwe or that Mexico is going to send you to Venezuela should be litigated when you’re still in U.S. custody on U.S. soil.

But if the issue only arises after the person has already been sent there, then it presents a more complicated question. This was a question in the Kilmar Ábrego García case, an immigrant who had been living in the United States and was deported to El Salvador last March, as well as in some other cases where the government is now obligated, as the Supreme Court has said, to “facilitate” their return to the U.S., but exactly what that entails depends very much on the nature of the arrangement between the two countries.

That leads us to Judge James Boasberg, a district-court judge in Washington. Last week, he said that the government needs to bring back more than a hundred Venezuelans who were wrongly deported under the Alien Enemies Act. What did you make of his order?

That order is limited to people who were sent to third countries and not Venezuelans who were sent to Venezuela. So that’s an important distinction: it doesn’t order the return of the Venezuelans who ended up, via El Salvador, in Venezuela.

What’s the importance of that?

Because it means that even this forceful order is not going to provide any measure of justice to the large number of people whose due-process rights were violated in the original incident that gave rise to litigation.

The Supreme Court order in the case, Trump v. J.G.G., is from early April and says due process requires that these Venezuelan nationals being deported be given notice, and they weren’t given notice. So although they ruled that all of these deportations were illegal, for all the people who ended up in Venezuela, this order isn’t going to provide them any justice. What the Boasberg order does is say that, for those who ended up in third countries, the government is obligated to “facilitate” their return. And that’s the language of the Supreme Court in the Ábrego García case, where he was deported in violation of an already existing court order that prohibited his removal.

This used to be pretty standard practice—that the government, when it made a mistake and deported people in violation of a court order, would facilitate their return. It would do that by having the embassy personnel contact the person and arrange their travel back to the U.S. Sometimes this would require the U.S. to pay for their travel, sometimes not. The Boasberg order requires the government to pay for the return travel of all the men who had been sent to El Salvador last March. Like I said, sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. But, either way, the obligation of the government to correct its mistake by facilitating the return of people should be uncontroversial because it is definitely something that happened routinely before.

I assume what we’re going to hear from this Administration is that this order interferes with the President’s ability to conduct foreign affairs. I imagine previous Administrations were not objecting to facilitating the return of wrongly deported people on these grounds.

Correct.

And the danger here is that such arguments do have some sort of merit for courts that are in favor of strong executive power.

For years, it has been routine practice for the government to facilitate the return of people who are deported in violation of court orders. There are a number of cases that establish this. I’ve had clients of mine who were in this situation, and this was the outcome. And Ábrego García was obviously brought back, although they charged him with a crime and kept trying to extradite him.

What I am confused by is, if the Supreme Court decided back in April that the Administration could continue deporting Venezuelans, why were these removals illegal?

That’s not quite right. There were Venezuelans who the Trump Administration asserted were members of the Tren de Aragua gang. And there was a habeas petition, which is a particular kind of lawsuit that allows somebody to challenge the legality of their imprisonment or other deprivations of liberty. The plaintiffs said, The government is trying to deport us without any process at all, and that is a violation of the Constitution, and we’re challenging that.

The government responded by saying, Oh, what you’re actually trying to do is challenge the lawfulness of your detention and the related deprivation of liberty. That means this has to be a habeas petition, and if you file it as a habeas petition, then it can only be filed in the district where you’re actually detained. And since the plaintiffs originally filed this lawsuit in Washington, D.C., the Court said, “You filed in the wrong court, because the plaintiffs are detained all over the country, with most of them in a couple of different divisions in Texas. So the suit has to be brought there.” But the plaintiffs disagreed, and insisted they were challenging the Alien Enemies Act itself.

Initially, Boasberg and the D.C. Circuit Court agreed with the plaintiff, but then the Supreme Court reversed that. And what the Supreme Court said was, If you can file a case as a habeas petition, then you have to file it as a habeas petition. So, even though you might think that this is a broad challenge to an unlawful policy, it can’t be brought that way. This is a challenge to your unlawful imprisonment and deportation, and, therefore, it has to be brought as a habeas petition. And because it has to be brought as a habeas petition, you can’t bring one lawsuit in D.C. to challenge this whole thing everywhere around the country. You have to file in each district separately where the people who are being detained actually are.

That was the holding of J.G.G. in early April, before the D.V.D. ruling. So the Supreme Court’s ruling was effectively that the government won because the plaintiffs filed in the wrong court and filed the wrong type of case. But they went on and said, Of course, the due-process clause applies in deportation cases. So these people are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act in their cases. There is an obvious tension between this and the D.V.D. case, which allowed the government to continue removing people. And Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed this out in her dissent in D.V.D.

But J.G.G. established a rule. And that rule is that the due-process clause requires notice and an opportunity to be heard before you can deport somebody under the Alien Enemies Act, just as with all other deportation cases. So that’s why it’s both true that the result of the J.G.G. was that they filed in the wrong court, and they had to refile. But it was also true that the Court’s ruling meant that the first attempt to deport these people under the Alien Enemies Act was illegal.

And that allows Boasberg to now say that the Administration has to facilitate their return?

Right. That, coupled with the fact that they violated his own order. It’s still the law that when a court issues a ruling, people have to follow the ruling. And if they think the ruling’s wrong, then they can appeal, but it doesn’t excuse them from following the ruling. When Boasberg ordered the planes to turn around in his original order, they should have turned the planes around. And they didn’t.

I know this is not exactly what we’ve been talking about, but it’s very closely related: Did you know, since the J.G.G. ruling, there have been thousands of habeas petitions filed, swamping the federal courts? It has gotten acute in Minnesota, but it’s happening all over the country. I know of habeas petitions being filed in huge numbers in Los Angeles, in Texas, in New York, and all around. That is happening in large part because the Supreme Court said in J.G.G. that, if a claim can be filed in habeas, it has to be filed in habeas. And this is a new ruling that they created in that case. There had been no prior precedent for that idea. As a result, these unlawful detentions that are the product of about maybe four or five Trump Administration policies that many courts have already ruled are illegal—like how the government has said that every undocumented person has to be held to mandatory detention—now have to be challenged in individual habeas filings. Normally, these policies would have been challenged broadly, just like the Trump Administration’s usage of the Alien Enemies Act was first challenged through a single case. And then the Court would’ve either enjoined it, in which case the government would’ve stopped using it to detain people, or they would’ve not enjoined, in which case the government would’ve continued to use it, but nobody would’ve sued over it. There wouldn’t have been a thousand individual cases about it. The plaintiffs would’ve appealed, and then the case would have been resolved.

But now, because of what the Supreme Court did in J.G.G., it has led to this proliferation of thousands and thousands of individual cases.

Why did the Court do this?

That’s a great question. I don’t know if they foresaw all the implications of what they were doing at the time they issued that ruling. The government hadn’t yet adopted all of these broad, new draconian detention rules. They had adopted some of them, but not all of them. So maybe the Court didn’t fully anticipate what was going to happen. But I think it’s also true that, for the past several years, the Supreme Court has had two simultaneous agendas. One is a very strong opposition to class action, and the idea that people who would otherwise go unrepresented should be able to get relief by combining their claims together. And then the second is restricting the availability of habeas relief for people who have alleged that they’re unlawfully detained. You can’t get rid of habeas claims, because they are in the Constitution. But they can make them more difficult to file, as we have seen this Court do. ♦

Films seen long ago but unavailable for rewatching often loom large, like myths shadowed by fear: Will a second viewing confirm or dispel the initial impression? I first saw “Caught in the Acts” (“Délits flagrants”), a documentary by the French director Raymond Depardon, in Paris, a few months after it opened there, in 1994, and it struck me as one of the greatest documentaries I’d ever seen. That film, showing behind-the-scenes interrogations of suspects in a Paris courthouse, has never been released here; I only recently was able to see it again, ahead of a copious retrospective of Depardon’s films opening at Film at Lincoln Center on February 20th, and that rewatch only reinforced my original feeling. Moreover, I found that other Depardon films in the series, both documentary and fiction, reverberate with “Caught in the Acts” in unexpected ways, intensifying that film’s impact while illuminating its place in the eighty-three-year-old director’s extensive career.

That career is an unusual one, both for its precocity and for its variety. Born to a farming family in east-central France in 1942, Depardon started out, in childhood, as a still photographer. He tells the story of those early days in his 1984 autobiographical documentary, “The Declic Years”—a weird mistranslation of the French title, “Les années déclic,” or “The Click Years.” At around ten or twelve, he built a darkroom and a studio in the family’s attic, and, at just fourteen, after completing his basic schooling, he became an apprentice at a local optician which also sold photographic equipment. At sixteen, he moved to Paris to become a photographer’s assistant, and, six months later, he went freelance. He already had designs on the cinema but was warned away from it because of his scant formal education. He began to film short TV documentary segments while continuing to travel widely on photo assignments. (He also co-founded a new agency, Gamma.) In 1970, he and a colleague were held prisoner for a month by Chad’s Army. In 1974, while covering the French Presidential candidate Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, he asked the candidate for permission to make a documentary about the campaign, inspired by the seminal 1960 documentary, “Primary,” produced by Robert Drew, about the rival campaigns of John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Giscard agreed, and Depardon made the film, which concluded with Giscard’s victory—yet, as France’s newly elected President, Giscard prohibited the movie from being shown. (It wasn’t released until 2002.) Nonetheless, Depardon got what he needed: the project made him a filmmaker.

The Giscard movie, “A Day in the Country” (“1974, une partie de campagne,” a pun: also “A Day in the Campaign”), set a definitive tone for Depardon’s career, as the first of many films in which he gets behind the scenes and shows what’s usually out of public view. Those films are inextricable from the question of access and its implications, both practical and legal—and the resulting tensions energize Depardon’s filmmaking aesthetic. In his most imaginatively conceived films he confronts fearsome systems of power—law and violence—and his terms of access to those systems forge the projects’ artistic form.

Take, for instance, his 1988 documentary, “Emergencies,” a masterwork of the genre, filmed in the E.R.s of a Paris hospital’s psychiatric ward. The bulk of the movie is set in intake rooms where potential patients are evaluated by medical professionals; hovering over their questioning is the possibility of patients’ involuntary hospitalization, whether for observation, protection, or treatment. The stakes of the exchanges are maximal: some individuals are accused of crimes; other are enduring mental-health crises that endanger their livelihoods or social standing; still others have been brought to the hospital as a result of suicide attempts. Trauma lurks in the background—sexual violence, family conflicts, substance abuse, solitude, the threat of deportation. The film’s artistry emerges in large part from the constraints of his shoot inside the hospital: Depardon (who does his own cinematography) is forced to film from only a few angles in a few tight spaces, and that compression both sharpens the interactions he captures and symbolizes the legal and medical power being brought to bear on the subjects. The filming requires, above all, a reserved, noninterventionist method, and Depardon turns that method into a cinematic style. (His first film on the subject, “News Items,” from 1983, involves a police station and its officers—but, strangely, his wide-ranging access on that project left the images relatively slack.) In “Emergencies,” his camera sits on a tripod or is handheld with minimal movement; frames remain static for extended periods of time. The effect isn’t passively observant but, rather, rigorously formal, embodying Depardon’s own concentrated engagement and demanding the same involvement of viewers.

With “Caught in the Acts,” Depardon rarefies this method further. In France, a person who, per the title, is arrested during a supposed criminal act is brought to an interview with a prosecutor—with no defense lawyer present. Depardon received permission to film such interviews at a courthouse in Paris (with the accord of individual suspects). His presence is so recessive that the resulting footage, however cannily composed, looks, for the most part, like it was made by an unattended surveillance camera. The interviews are presented in extended takes, with minimal editing, mainly via jump cuts. They are filmed in side views, with the suspect and the prosecutor facing each other across the official’s desk—but this compositional symmetry is the only thing equal about the discussions taking place. The prosecutor recites the official version of each case and asks the suspect for his or her version of events. A young and hearing-impaired man with a somewhat bewildered air, who committed many small offenses but had never been imprisoned, is now legally an adult and is terrified to learn that he may face jail time for stealing a bag from a car. A man arrested for running a game of three-card monte tells the prosecutor that the police offered to let him go if he would inform against big-time gamblers or pimps, a betrayal that he fears would amount to a death sentence.

Some of the suspects try to minimize their actions with euphemisms or paraphrases; others do so with explanations that the prosecutors find utterly implausible. Some deny the charges outright, while others confess freely. As filmed by Depardon, the clashes reveal a radical disconnect between the representatives of the law and the people accused of breaking it. One prosecutor suggests that an addict leave Paris and move someplace where drugs are unavailable (he corrects her, explaining that there’s no such place); another responds sarcastically to a young man who claims that the police beat him into a confession. The film reveals racial inequities, too, as suspects who are preponderantly not white are brought before prosecutors who almost uniformly are. But what the pressurized interviews yield, above all, is a historical disconnect. The accused bring with them the burdens of poverty, addiction, isolation, physical or mental illness, and the relentless stress of exclusion. The interviews are filled with a litany of these troubled personal histories, which come across as sentences unto themselves. Late in the film, after a long and tense shot of a man being brought in handcuffs to a prison cell, Depardon cuts to an exterior view of the courthouse, with pedestrians going by. The breath of air, and the freedom of movement, only reinforce the moral asphyxiation taking place inside—and emphasize the unyielding authority sustaining the city’s public life.

“Caught in the Acts” and “Emergencies” are part of an unofficial trilogy that’s capped by “The 10th District Court—Moments of Trials,” from 2004, another film of momentous legal clashes. Again, Depardon got special permission to film what others can’t—actual trials, in a courtroom. The cases involve charges of the same sort as in “Caught in the Acts,” but whereas that earlier film puts interrogator and subject together in the frame, as if in a bullfight, “The 10th District Court” is made with minimal intervention of another sort: multiple cameras filming subjects in isolation, emphasizing the defendants’ desperate solitude. These trials are by judge, not jury, and defendants wear street clothing of a startling informality. Unlike the highly codified theatre of rational analysis and rhetorical flair that’s staged in American courtrooms, the French system on view in “The 10th District Court” is confrontational: defendants are free to lie, and judges pound away skeptically, even derisively, and the filmed effect is of watching defendants squirm as they become aware that the hot water they’re in is starting to boil. Most are evasive, a few are obsequious, many are defiant, a few are enraged, and all appear to feel their lives slipping away under the seemingly boundless force of judicial inquisition.

Depardon has made only four fiction features in the course of his career, and one of them, “Captive of the Desert,” stands alongside his legal trilogy and his autobiography as an idiosyncratic, audacious masterpiece. Released in 1990, it is based on the story of a real-life French archeologist, Françoise Claustre, whom Depardon (as he explains in “The Declic Years”) filmed, as a documentarian, in the mid-seventies, when she was being held captive by rebel forces in Chad. Whereas his documentaries are among the great cinematic fusions of word and image, “Captive of the Desert,” filmed in Niger, is a work of enforced silence amid images of ineffable awe. The actress Sandrine Bonnaire (who’d risen to fame in the eighties, as a teen-ager, with Maurice Pialat’s “À Nos Amours” and Agnès Varda’s “Vagabond”) plays the unnamed title character, whom Depardon catches in medias res, already a prisoner of nomadic rebels who are being driven across the desert by government persecution.

The captive Claustre told Depardon that she tries “to think of the present, to think of nothing,” and Depardon, in dramatizing such a story, visualizes and externalizes the nothingness of her thoughts. Only a few of her captors speak French, so most of her days are spent nonverbally (and Depardon reinforces the isolation by not subtitling the rebels’ dialogue in their native language). The film shows the captors’ comings and goings, their discussions among themselves, and the captive’s efforts to keep occupied with her few books, with photos, with basic hygiene, and with memory games involving her address book. The pace isn’t slow but, rather, timeless; Depardon builds it with long takes that are emptied of what the captive thinks of as her life but full of an alternative time scale, a meta-experience of its own. Some of the film’s greatest images, of the captive simply walking alone in the desert, have the trance-like, hypnotic power of visual music (and make the desert views of this year’s acclaimed “Sirāt” look like stage sets). “Captive of the Desert” is a movie of power, too—that of the captors, that of the desert itself—and, like the courtroom and prosecutors’ offices, the harsh environment determines the movie’s form.

As Depardon’s films show, one form of power common to all is the power of memory, and in “The Declic Years” he finds a form for his own. In making himself the subject of scrutiny, he pointed a movie camera at his own face, in extreme closeup and with stark frontal lighting, putting himself into his own exacting interrogative spotlight as he dredges the practical and emotional specifics of his past and considers his own photos and films. “The Declic Years” was made a few years after the death of his father, and at one point Depardon expresses regret that he didn’t spend more time and effort filming the places of his childhood, his family, the farm. He did ultimately make three films about farm life, two volumes of “Profils Paysans” and “La Vie Moderne,” but the sensibility arising from his childhood is more vigorously present in his films capturing subjects that seemed remote from it. By contrast with the work of other documentary filmmakers of similarly observational ardor, Depardon’s method is rugged. Where Frederick Wiseman’s attention is analytical and the Maysles brothers’ attention is dramatic, Depardon’s is a tree trunk—blunt, rough, heavy, a raw thing to hew that keeps its rings of history even after shaping and trimming. His patience as a documentarian is that of the longue durée—of a childhood spent under the fourteenth-century gates of his parents’ property. He keeps the camera in place long enough that it seems to grow roots and draw strength from the earth. The beauty of his images, amid unnatural constraints, isn’t a matter of style but of natural force. ♦

At eleven minutes to eight o’clock on the morning of January 27th, in Corona, Queens, Manuela, a twenty-three-year-old undocumented immigrant from Ecuador, was about to wake up her daughter when she received a string of panicked WhatsApp messages from her husband, Iván. “Mami, migración got me,” Iván, who is also undocumented, wrote. It was one of seventeen frantic texts, punctuated by typos and sobbing emojis, in the course of three minutes. “My God.” “Noo, my love.” “Pay my phone bill.” “Please. Mami.” “Please. Mami.” “I don’t have.” “Signal.” “They were just outside.” “They grabbed me.” “Three of them.” “And they’re taking me away.”

He had stepped out of the house only minutes earlier, and was heading to his job with a roofing contractor, when he walked right into a group of federal agents near Roosevelt Avenue. Iván was clearly terrified. He had never been convicted of a crime, Manuela told me, but he did have a deportation order to his name. He’d missed a scheduled immigration hearing, early last year. Manuela said that his hearing date had been changed but they had not been notified; it’s likely that his notice to appear had arrived at an old address.

When Iván was detained, his mind leaped to Manuela and Nicole, their three-year-old daughter, who lived with him in a rented semi-basement room up the street. He sent Manuela the texts so that she would know what had happened to him, and in the hope that she would pay his cellphone bill. It had been due a day earlier, and he was evidently desperate for his phone to continue working so that he could contact her later from wherever ICE had taken him. In fact, immigration authorities routinely remove migrants’ phones and other personal belongings; Iván wouldn’t be able to respond to any messages or calls after being apprehended.

With the notable exception of the harrowing arrests at immigration courthouses downtown, the scale of ICE activity in New York City hasn’t been close to what has been seen in such places as Minneapolis or Southern California. Still, neighborhood coalitions in Queens frequently share reports of active federal agents in migrant-dense areas, including Corona, East Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights. A video recently shared with the news outlet The City shows agents busting into an East Elmhurst home and threatening a mother who was holding her baby. “Put your fucking hands up, stupid,” one agent says. In a predawn raid in Jackson Heights, scores of militarized agents from the Department of Homeland Security descended with assault weapons on a residential building, removing a man and woman from their apartment. ICE is said to frequently use the parking lots of a CVS Pharmacy and a TD Bank on Northern Boulevard as staging areas, and the agency appears to be most active in the early morning, when men like Iván are on their way to work.

Manuela’s life had turned in an instant. A foot of snow had just fallen in New York City, and the morning was frigid, but she had otherwise been preparing for a normal day: she would walk Nicole to a free preschool run by a Catholic Charities center, and she would continue her search for a job. Now her husband wasn’t coming back. She knew nothing about where he was being taken or how to reach him. Frantic and crying, Manuela called her mother, a middle-aged farmer in the remote central highlands of Ecuador, who, from so far away and not knowing where else to turn, sent a WhatsApp audio message to me. In 2024, I was reporting an article about Ecuadorian migrants for this magazine, and I had interviewed her and Manuela, who was then preparing to join Iván in New York.

“Yes, good morning, good morning, may God bless you, how are you?” Even in this emergency, Manuela’s mother began her voice note, in Kichwa-accented Spanish, with a series of formal salutations. “My son-in-law was in Queens, New York, and he was caught by migration, and he was taken away. My daughter is crying. He was taken just now, over there in Queens, New York. . . . You wouldn’t have a way of getting a lawyer, would you? Please help me.”

Manuela and I had kept in touch occasionally since her arrival in New York, in August of 2024, but it was challenging to keep track of her. She changed phone numbers a couple of times, and sometimes my messages went unanswered, or they were never delivered at all. Mostly, I learned something new from her if she reached out first—about where she was living, who she was spending time with, or how she and her little girl were faring.

After receiving the message from Manuela’s mom that day, I wrote to Manuela on Facebook Messenger, the only way I was sure of getting through. “What happened?” I asked. This time, she responded within seconds. “My husband was caught by immigration,” she confirmed, before adding, “Buenos días.” Switching to her latest WhatsApp number, she sent me a screenshot of the final messages Iván had texted her. She also sent photographs of documents that had been generated when he first crossed into the country, illegally, in April of 2024, and was intercepted by U.S. Border Patrol officers in the desert near Sasabe, Arizona. Printed on one of the sheets was his A-number, short for alien registration number—a unique numerical code assigned to non-citizen immigrants, including undocumented border crossers and green-card holders. Manuela could now use Iván’s A-number to search for him in ICE’s online detainee-locator system. But at first the system produced no results—he hadn’t been processed yet. Some four hours had passed since Iván was detained, and Manuela still had no idea where he was.

At the same time, she was facing a growing list of responsibilities and decisions, with few resources to inform her choices. Chief among those questions was whether she should stay in the U.S. to wait for her husband’s case to be resolved. Would he be deported quickly or held indefinitely? Would he be sent to Ecuador or somewhere else? She did not have the money to wait for more than a few days. She had only five hundred dollars in cash, and eight hundred dollars in rent was due in five days, on the first of February. Iván had finally found some steady work, but Manuela had struggled to find work ever since arriving in the U.S.; mostly, she’d looked after Nicole. Without her husband, she was essentially alone in the country, and had no close family to lean on; both she and Nicole were also undocumented, though their immigration cases were still in progress, and she had a court date scheduled for April. “I don’t know if I should go to Ecuador or not,” Manuela told me. Her mother was encouraging her to use the little money she had to buy plane tickets for her and Nicole. “But others tell me to stay, and to wait for him to try to make it back to this country. . . . I don’t know what to do. . . . I’m not working, and that scares me the most.”

At around one o’clock that afternoon, Iván finally called her. He said he’d been told that he would be deported to Ecuador in eight days. By the evening, he was in an ICE preliminary holding area at Federal Plaza, in downtown Manhattan. “He said that it’s very bad in there, and he doesn’t want to stay locked up,” Manuela told me. Later that night, I asked her if she had decided what to do. “I’ll drop off my daughter at preschool,” she texted, close to midnight. “And see if I know anything new about my husband.”

The next morning, Manuela seemed more hopeful. “I want to get a lawyer to see about getting him out of there,” she texted me. She had spoken with some of Iván’s relatives who lived in the Bronx. They wanted to find legal help, which she understood was very expensive—not to mention the fact that, given that a removal order for Iván had already been in place for nearly a year, his fate was likely sealed. But after all they had been through as a couple—surviving separate journeys from Ecuador and forging a new life in America for themselves—Manuela was not ready to give up so easily. “I want to provide a better life for my daughter,” she told me.

The little that Manuela knew about how to navigate life in the United States came from what other migrants had told her directly, and from what she saw on TikTok and Facebook (which wasn’t always reliable). Even more than other Indigenous Ecuadorian migrants I have come to know over the past several years, she lived a particularly precarious life in New York. Manuela, who had limited formal schooling, had trouble writing—this was clear from her texts, in which she constantly used “k” for “que” and “a” for “ha” and combined and misspelled most words. This made even the simplest bureaucratic tasks very difficult. She’d never found her way to the sort of nonprofits that offer legal services to migrants in the city, learning that they existed only after her husband was detained.

She and Iván still owed more than fifteen thousand dollars to a financial coöperative in Ecuador that had lent them more than twenty thousand for their treks through South and Central America and into the United States. Both of their families—Indigenous Puruhá farmers—were incredibly poor. Iván had left first, after his mother had developed an aggressive cancer; he was determined to find the money to pay for her treatments. “He left to save his mother, but she died when he was still on his way,” Manuela told me. By then, he had already walked across the Darién Gap, and was somewhere in Mexico; he couldn’t turn back. Manuela and Nicole, then just two years old, followed him once he’d safely arrived in New York. Avoiding the Darién Gap, they flew from Peru to Colombia to El Salvador; after she and Nicole made it to Mexico, they were locked up by smugglers, who extorted the family for an additional thousand dollars to insure their safe passage.

Amid the vast wave of new migrants and asylum seekers looking for work in New York, Manuela and Iván struggled to earn enough money. Before their first winter set in, they moved to Rochester, where Manuela became a housekeeper at a hotel. But their marriage nearly buckled under the pressure. In January, 2025, Manuela sent me a message asking how she and Nicole could get to Chicago, where a cousin lived. She had decided to separate from Iván, she said, because he spent a lot of time drinking with male friends, despite her objections. But she had no way to leave, and they were still living together. “I just want to go away,” she said. An uncle in Queens intervened to mitigate the crisis. “He didn’t let me separate,” Manuela told me. Her parents also did not want her to leave Iván. So she stayed. A few days later, she posted on WhatsApp a video of her husband and daughter, decorated with numerous praying-hands emojis. “We all deserve a second chance,” she told me, by way of explanation. “But if he doesn’t value it, in time I could end up separating after all.” By June of 2025, they had moved back to Queens. When they returned to the city, they found Iván’s removal order waiting for him, signed by a judge.

After her husband was detained, Manuela imagined what would happen if she went back to Ecuador. It certainly wouldn’t solve her financial problems: her family would never be able to pay back their debt. The financial coöperative would take her father’s truck, which had been used as collateral. She feared that her family might even end up in jail. “That’s why we don’t want to go back yet,” she continued to insist. “I’m going to get my husband out.”

Whatever hope she had of his quick release began to fade by the afternoon of his second day in detention. Iván called Manuela again, to say that he’d been transferred to a new facility, in New Jersey. The online locator system had updated to show that he was now being held at Delaney Hall, a notorious, privately run detention center in Newark. He told Manuela that she urgently needed to deposit money in his detention account, so that he could keep calling her with updates. He provided her with a telephone number and a PIN for making the deposits. She didn’t have time to find a piece of paper, so she scribbled the numbers down on the wall, above the light switch in her room. “I have no idea where I have to go to make the deposit,” she told me. I didn’t know, either.

She eventually found her way to a money-transfer office near 103rd Street, and deposited twenty dollars. With the exception of taking her daughter to and from the day-care center, it was the first time she had left her room since Iván’s arrest. They spoke again on the phone. He told her that he had offered her name and other information to the ICE agents, because he thought that it would make it easier for them to all leave voluntarily together. Manuela wasn’t happy about this—she worried that agents would now track her down and arrest her, too.

The rest of the week passed with little new information from Iván’s calls. By the third day, Manuela learned that he was being fed very little; he hardly had an appetite, though. He was very cold from sleeping on the floor, and had started feeling sick. “They don’t even give him a blanket,” she told me, after his only call of the day. (A D.H.S. official denied that there were hostile conditions at the center where Iván was being held, saying “ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”) Manuela wasn’t making any headway on finding a lawyer; in truth, she told me, she didn’t even know where to begin. Manuela passed the days in her room, fielding calls from close relatives in Ecuador and from more distant ones in Queens, all of whom asked her for updates that she couldn’t provide. Despondent, she downloaded the CBP Home app, which the U.S. government uses to pay migrants to self-deport. She filled out her information, and waited for a response.

On the fourth day, a Friday, I received a voice message from Manuela that suggested she had begun to resign herself to calamity. Her rent was due in two days. “He’s still in New Jersey, they’re still not taking him out,” she said. “In any case, I want to buy the tickets to be able to leave, because this country is only going to get more difficult, more than anything with the current President. There’s no chance of me staying here. I don’t have the resources for a lawyer.” (Later that weekend, I put her in contact with an immigration attorney I’d met through previous reporting. The attorney told her that there was no clear remedy for her husband’s situation.)

A cousin began looking into buying tickets to Ecuador for her and Nicole. He collected four hundred and twenty dollars in cash from her. (Manuela didn’t have a bank account in the U.S., let alone a credit or debit card to purchase a flight online; when I asked her, she didn’t seem to know about travel agencies in the neighborhood which would let her pay for everything in cash.) By the start of the weekend, the matter seemed to be settled: she and her daughter would leave on Monday night, arriving in Quito at five the following morning.

Manuela told me that she was now certain of her decision, whether or not she received money from the U.S. government in exchange for leaving. “I cannot stay here anymore, because there is no way that my husband will get out of jail,” she reiterated. I called Manuela’s mother, who confirmed to me that she and her husband planned to leave their small town at midnight and drive all night in order to be at the airport when their daughter arrived at dawn.

That Friday afternoon, when Manuela had picked Nicole up from day care in Corona, she had told the teachers that her daughter would not be returning, because they were leaving the country. The day-care center gave Manuela a letter confirming Nicole’s enrollment, in case she needed it, and said that she was welcome to come back if their plans changed. But Manuela knew, at that point, that they would not stay in America without Iván. Nicole had a strong attachment to her father, and she never wanted to leave his side. Whenever the little girl asked where he was, Manuela only said, “He is working,” and Nicole accepted that answer for the time being. Before leaving the day-care center, Manuela filled up a cloth Target bag with Nicole’s school supplies and some artwork, and the two of them walked home between tall piles of snow.

“Something happened with my flight,” Manuela wrote to me on Sunday afternoon, the day before she planned to depart.“My cousin, he bought the flights for me and my daughter, but now he doesn’t want to give me the tickets,” she explained. Only after she called an uncle, to see what was the matter, did her cousin finally return her cash—it seemed that no tickets had been purchased in the first place. “I think he wanted to take my money,” Manuela said, though she wasn’t sure why he’d do that. Her plan had fallen apart. On WhatsApp, her mother reprimanded her for being too trusting of others—even of relatives. Manuela was angry with her cousin, and got very emotional just thinking that he might try to take advantage of her when she was in such a dire situation. She contacted her landlord, an Ecuadorian homeowner who lived upstairs. He told her that she could stay for an extra week, rent-free, because of her circumstance, but then she would have to go.

Five days had passed since Iván was arrested. According to the detainee-locator system, he was still in New Jersey, but he’d stopped calling as frequently. Manuela, who felt more alone than ever, only wanted their American nightmare to end. She had already sold or allocated most of her furniture—a television, some bedsheets, a dresser—to other migrants she knew. A pink rolling suitcase was packed with what few clothes that the family owned. This was what remained of the tiny life Manuela and Iván had tried to make for themselves in New York City. An Ecuadorian and American flag, which she and Iván had bought at a ninety-nine-cent store when they first arrived in town, blocked the basement’s small windows so that no one could see her inside.

On February 9th—the day after Manuela was supposed to leave her apartment, and almost two weeks after her husband’s arrest—she and her daughter flew to Quito. The first leg of her flight, to Panama, was delayed nearly two hours on the tarmac at J.F.K. Manuela gazed out her window for a long while, feeling a mixture of emotions. She missed her parents, who would be waiting for her when she arrived. She wondered if the U.S. government would ever send her the money for leaving. And she thought of Iván, who had been transferred yet again, to a detention center in California. She wasn’t sure when she would see him again, or where. ♦

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Toni Morrison was many things in her lifetime—Nobel laureate, renowned author, Princeton professor, and generous mentor to young writers. Her appeal translated seamlessly to the internet, where old interview clips still bubble up regularly on social media, reminding us of her sharp wit and commanding presence. But, as Namwali Serpell argues in a new book of essays, “On Morrison,” this undeniable star persona risks eclipsing the genius—and complexity—of the eleven novels she wrote. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz dive back into these works to rediscover the writer as she was on the page. The hosts discuss Morrison’s début novel, “The Bluest Eye”; “Beloved,” which is widely regarded as her masterpiece; and “Jazz,” the experimental 1992 novel believed to be her personal favorite. Throughout her career, she insisted on writing flawed, dynamic characters rather than paragons of virtue. “The Morrison project is to put Black life, and particularly the lives of Black women, at the very center of literature—but to do it in a way that’s true to character and to human experience,” Schwartz says. “The people she’s writing about are damaged, are greedy, are jealous, are sad . . . and also are generous, and loving, and hurt and trying to heal.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“On Morrison,” by Namwali Serpell
“Toni Morrison, the Teacher,” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)
“The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison
“Song of Solomon,” by Toni Morrison
“Toni Morrison and the Ghosts in the House,” by Hilton Als (The New Yorker)
“Jazz,” by Toni Morrison
“Beloved,” by Toni Morrison
“Sula,” by Toni Morrison
“Black Writers in Praise of Toni Morrison” (The New York Times)
“The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War,” by Jesse McCarthy
Monuments at MOCA and the Brick
“Language as Liberation,” by Toni Morrison

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.